by Mark Tufo
“How far to where we’re going?”
“Eighty-six,” the corporal answered.
“Um, I hate to talk basic math.”
“It’s okay, Captain. It’ll take a couple of days there and back, but we have a solar array that will juice them up. Not the worst thing in the world to hang out at the beach for a little R&R.”
“Might be better if you come onto the ship, be safer. Just leave the cars,” BT told him. I had to agree.
We kept on rolling. It was quiet; the car didn’t make any noise and there was no music coming through the speakers. I was done with this expedition. I could hardly sit still for want of getting back to what was now our home.
“Just about halfway,” the corporal said as he switched from main to auxiliary power
“Will you stop moving around? We’re uncomfortably close for you to be wiggling.”
“Maybe if I had more than a sliver of seat, I could sit back.”
“Yeah, because this is fun for me.”
Drove in silence for a while. I was getting motion sickness, which was strange considering I was wedged in tight. Thought about telling the corporal to pull over so I could get some air and some circulation back in my ass. Was about to, when the large radio mounted to the roof, which had remained silent the entire trip, decided now would be a good time to squawk.
“Player two, this is Vendor. Come in, Player Two.”
“This is Player Two,” the corporal responded.
“Bilgeworks reports congestion in the pipes.”
BT and I both looked at each other. We had no idea what was being said, but the corporal’s face led me to believe it was something we should be concerned about.
“Continue,” McCander said into the radio. “Ashford, could you give me the codes.” The private in the passenger seat pulled a sheet from his pocket.
“Be advised, Player Two, the faraday cage is lined with platinum. Out.”
“Message received, out. Shit,” the corporal said as he hung the handset up.
“Want to let the rest of us know what’s going on?” I asked as the corporal divided his time between watching the road and reading the paper.
“Your ship reported seeing a dozen vehicles following us. They’re ten miles behind and gaining.”
“Yup, that’s worth a ‘shit.’ Shit. Maybe make this thing go a little faster.”
“Without a trailer, it tops at sixty; with it, we can’t go much above forty-five.”
“BT, there’s a word problem here, I was always intimidated by them.”
“Let me guess, Joanie Smatterpack, the cheerleader, was in your math class.”
“I was sixteen, BT. I found things to like about nearly every female in school, including a good portion of the teachers—except for Mrs. Tillingsley. She was about ninety and had glasses that could start a fire in under a minute if orientated the right way. We had to take a class on the proper use of fire extinguishers before we could start the semester. Just figure out the problem.”
“Corporal, how far are we from where we’re going?” BT asked.
“Fifteen miles.”
“Well, if we stay at forty-five and they’re going roughly seventy-five and we have a ten-mile lead, they should catch us in twenty minutes…fuck me.”
“What?” I asked.
“That can’t be right.” He was mumbling through the math again. “It is. Shit.”
“You’re killing me, man.”
“If all those things stay constant, we’re going to arrive at our landing point at exactly the same time.”
“Shit.”
“Corporal, you want to give your base that information? It’d be nice to have some help waiting for us.”
“Vendor, this is Player Two. Please tell bilgeworks…” He paused, looking at his sheet to get the right code words. “Player Two will be at Canterbury Farms eating beef Wellington. The faraday cage will be joining us.”
“Roger that Player Two. Good luck, over and out.”
“Out.” McCander handed the mic to the private to hang back up. “Should have started with the auxiliary batteries; could have jettisoned them for speed.” He banged the steering wheel.
“You couldn’t have known,” I told him. “We all thought Knox was going to slink off to hide under whatever rock he’d crawled out from.”
I would silently count off a minute and then turn to look. I’d let out a sigh of relief every time I did and they still weren’t in sight. Two minutes passed, then four. I was thinking we were going to make it with time to spare, that perhaps Knox’s convoy was going a little slower than BT had figured. As six minutes elapsed with fourteen to go, I caught my first glimpse. We were so close, but I had no doubt they would catch us before we got to the beach. That they were going just a touch faster than we’d accounted for—or the Prius was moving a midge slower.
“Might be time for protocol two,” McCander said as he reached to grab the radio.
“Protocol two?” I asked, sounded a lot like Plan B, and I wanted to know what the less-than-optimal proposal was before it was enacted.
“I’ll have the three other cars stop and delay them while we get you to safety.”
“By delay, you mean sacrifice?”
McCander’s tight-lipped look back at me in the mirror was all I needed to know.
“We all make it or none of us do,” I told him.
“With all due respect, sir, our mission is to get you two and the majors to safety, at all costs.”
“If any stop, we all stop. I will not have others risk their lives for mine. Hell, Corporal! You didn’t even know any of us existed twenty-four hours ago.”
“Not the point, sir. I’ve been ordered.”
“Here we go,” BT said.
“Who’s the highest ranking in this car, Corporal?”
“You are, sir.”
“I am ordering you at this time to not put protocol two into effect. There is a chance your mission parameters have changed.”
“I can radio the base,” Private Ashford offered.
“You touch that radio and I will put a bullet in it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s busted, and now you have to take directives from me. We clear?”
“But the radio isn’t broken…I can still see the on light,” Ashford intoned.
“Did your mother not follow nutritional guidelines when you were growing up, son?” I asked him.
“Huh?”
“I’m asking if you were fed a steady diet of Ring Dings for dinner.”
“We weren’t allowed to eat sugar when I was growing up.”
“Who would have figured?” I looked over at BT. “Maybe that’s his problem.”
BT shrugged, which meant his shoulder pushed my head back.
“Maybe you needed a few bowls of Sugar Smacks to energize those synapses.”
“So, can I use the radio or not?” Ashford asked, clearly confused about what was going on.
“Corporal, you want to give him a heads up? Otherwise, the captain here is going to continue on this digression, and I don’t think any of us want to deal with that.”
“No.” McCander pointed at Ashford as if he were a puppy about to chew through a couch cushion.
I kept an eye out on our pursuers. It looked like when they caught sight of us, they squeezed a bit more horsepower out of their vehicles.
“Time,” I asked, not turning back around. I checked my rifle.
“Twelve minutes.”
The group behind was no longer one jumbled mass. It had begun to take on definition. I could make out individual cars and trucks, and there were a bunch of them.
“Where the fuck is the carrier help?” I asked.
Like he could hear me, Eastman was asking the very same thing. We hadn’t had the foresight to come up with code words, so, if Knox was listening, he knew we were in position, whatever and wherever that meant. It had better be in the next eight or nine minutes, otherwise we were going to be in some deadly trouble.
&nbs
p; “I think Knox is on this channel.” I’d been watching non-stop, and when McCander called out the ten-minute mark, I was pretty sure.
“What makes you say that?” BT tried to turn; it wasn’t going well as he twisted and bent.
“Will you stop that?” I was getting tossed around like a lone sailor on a dinghy during rough seas.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
“The main group appears to have fallen back, and there are a couple of scout cars. It’s that or the scout cars are faster and making ground up quicker—I can’t tell, yet. But I’m thinking Knox is sending some expendable feelers out there, kind of like when we put Kirby on point.”
“Oh.” BT again attempted to twist, but his shoulders wedged tight between the front and back seats. At seven minutes, the trailing enemy felt they were close enough to send some bullets our way.
McCander quickly grabbed the microphone “Remmie, feel free to drop your balls.” He was looking through his side-view mirror.
“Balls?” I asked.
“Open the glove box,” McCander told Ashford.
“Cubby.”
“What?” McCander asked.
“Don’t. Now you’re just playing right into it,” BT lamented.
“A cubby is a small snug place for storage; when’s the last time anyone ever put gloves in that box?” I told him.
“I…I don’t know…there’s no gloves in there now.”
“Mick, I thought officers weren’t supposed to be crazy,” Ashford asked. McCander shrugged.
“Um anyway, we had all of the cars retrofitted with these.” I pushed up to look at a black box with five rings attached.
“Okay, what am I looking at?”
“These are each attached to the pin of a grenade. When I pull on it, the pin comes out and the grenade drops. Call them balls, well, because, you know.”
“They dangle down!” Ashford said.
“Have they ever been tried in the field?” I asked.
“Never had a reason to,” McCander said. I didn’t like it at all. Grenades were odd-shaped things that could bounce around crazily like a fumbled football; you never knew where those things were going to end up. I had my misgivings, and it looked like I was going to be proved right when Remmie dropped a grenade. It bounced much higher than I thought possible before skirting wildly to the right. Then, just as quickly as I thought I could pull out an “I told you so,” I was proven wrong. Knox’s lead car pulled up alongside the explosive just as it detonated. The driver’s door, along with the driver, was shredded by shrapnel. No fiery explosion beside the grenade, but the car did flip, sending occupants hurtling into space without the benefit of a parachute. All crash landed in ways that led me to believe none of them were ever going to walk away from that.
Remmie dropped another ball, but the next car in line had learned a valuable lesson and pulled back. The resultant explosion served more as a loud warning to stay away. The car continued to drop back, but two machinegun mounted pick-up trucks were getting into position.
“BT, I need some math.”
“I’m not a fucking calculator.”
“Grenades explode in what, four seconds?” I asked.
“Five and a half,” Ashford replied.
“That’s very specific.” I looked toward him.
“I dropped one in training; I had to memorize the safety manual.”
“Fair enough. Okay, BT, grenades detonate at five and a half seconds, and we’re moving at what?”
“Forty miles an hour and slowing. As the batteries drain, we lose power,” McCander answered.
“Okay, how many feet are we traveling per second?”
“Fifty-eight, almost fifty-nine.” He blurted it out so quickly I thought he was full of shit.
“Seriously?”
BT shrugged. This time, I was sure he meant to hit me in the nose as he made the gesture. “Fifty-eight almost fifty-nine times five and a half.”
“Three hundred and twenty-three feet,” he said, nearly before I finished asking.
“You’re freaking me out; how did I not know you were a savant? So, okay, roughly a bit more than a football field…provided the grenade-ball once released stays somewhat on the road. That’s the target distance. Those trucks are close to that distance away from the trailing car. McCander, tell Remmie to drop the rest of what he has.” I was watching as the gunners opened fire. They were blistering the roadway and the ass of the trailer with lead. It wouldn’t be long before they destroyed his power supply, then they would dispatch of the car and the people inside while moving on to the next in line, which just so happened to be us. One of the soldiers in Remmie’s car was returning fire. My gut roiled when I saw his arm get blown off at the shoulder. He was just being pulled back into the car when another bullet ended his suffering. The spray from his disintegrated head coated the side of the trailer in garish red streaks. Looked something like the blowback from a cherry Slurpee thrown out of the window on a hot summer day’s drive.
McCander had no sooner told Remmie what to do when a bright, streaking arc of electricity shot up from the top of the battery box, curved around, and grounded on the trailer. Their lights blinked rapidly then quit. They’d lost all power.
“McCander, we need to stop!”
“Sorry, sir. I can’t.” He grimaced as he watched what was happening in his rearview mirror.
I was reaching for my sidearm; figured I’d give him a gentle reminder of how things worked in my world. BT restrained me and shook his head. As Remmie’s car lost speed, the trucks gained.
“Bronson, you’re taking up the rear,” McCander said as the car ahead of us slowed and we pulled around. I was pissed. I didn’t want to die, but I’d had enough of others dying for me. We were leaving Remmie behind. I’d not known it then, but he dropped all his balls once he’d stopped. The trailer flew up into the air, Knox’s lead truck took the brunt of the explosion in the front end. The quarter panel and wheel were blown off completely. The machinegunner and his weapon were erased from the world like a chalkboard equation as the trailer swerved off and into him. The second truck, which had been following too closely, tried to avoid the carnage but smashed at speed into the ruined truck ahead of them. Two exited from Remmie’s car and were setting up a hasty defense. They were going to buy us some time with their lives; it was a very high exchange of valuable commodities…was it too high?
“How far now?” I asked angrily.
“Three miles, sir,” McCander replied. I looked over his shoulder. We weren’t going much over thirty miles per hour. This was insane. The closer we got, the longer it was going to take, for as much sense as that made.
“Where the fuck is our help? The cavalry is supposed to come to us, not the other way around. Not much of a movie rescue if we have to go looking for it.”
“What the fuck?” BT yelled. “That Kirby?”
The Marine was on the side of the road, holding up a large sign. “Don’t ask,” it read. He melted back into the woods as we rolled by. With as slow as we were going, we could have read through most of the King James version of the Bible.
Grimm was another five hundred feet up with another sign; they must have thought we would be going a lot faster than we were. His sign was not well received. It read: “Drive off dock!”
“The cars will be ruined,” Ashford said.
“You like this car better than your life?” I asked.
“Roll down the windows,” McCander said. “Once we hit the water, it won’t take long until we lose power.”
“Fuck.” This wasn’t one of my biggest fears because I didn’t think about it much, but driving into the ocean while a car filled with water was terrifying. I’d once done Marine Corps training that involved being strapped into a simulated helicopter going down in the water. We were in a large rig, set in a pool, strapped into a chair, then flipped upside down into the water. We then had to undo the restraining harness and pull ourselves out of the structure. I didn’t like that, and it wa
s only in eight feet of water with two divers there to assist should someone panic or get trapped. The water at the end of the pier had to be over thirty feet deep and, as far as I knew, there weren’t any safety precautions. Add to the fact that four cars and four trailers were going to be hitting the water hard, and it sounded like a recipe fraught with the potential for disaster. “You going to fit through the window?” BT was doing the same calculation as he looked at his egress. A chime went off as he clicked the door open. “I’m going to follow you out,” I told him.
Could see the beach and the dock. There were two people on the docks themselves, both had on scuba gear and held large neon sticks, directing traffic like airport tarmac employees, which was appropriate, as we were about to take flight. The lead car drove onto the pier and was being sent to the end. The large wooden pylons had been sawed off so that they could go forward unencumbered. My heart was slamming in my chest as I watched. Eastman’s car went in next, his slightly to the left of the first. We were up next, and, instead of straight off, we were directed to the left. McCander cut the wheel a little too soon. My door was crushed in and the car spun to BT’s side. My upper half was forced into him, my left leg pinned by the creased door and the seat.
I was pulling frantically. “I’m stuck, man.” Those were the last words I could say before my head slammed off of the front headrest and I browned out. Wasn’t quite sleeping with the fishes, but I was definitely taking a nap.
37
Bt
BT had one hand on the headrest and the other on his door. He placed the toe of his boot down by the bottom hinge to make sure that the water pressure didn’t push it closed. The car plummeted fifteen feet into the sea, the impact so jarring BT was half convinced they’d landed on concrete.
“Damn,” was all he managed to say as the bracing water splashed up over his legs and chest. It was so cold he could think of little else except escaping. He took a glance at Mike, partly to commiserate; that was when he noticed his friend’s head lolling to the side and blood pouring from his nose and forehead. The fear he had for himself immediately dissipated as he realized he needed to save the other man. Ashford and McCander had wasted no time getting out. The car was sinking fast. BT kept Mike’s head propped up and inside a pocket of air. He had a light grip on him, figuring that when he pulled, they would both go out the door. Unfortunately, Mike didn’t budge.